


the taste of freedom

by poisonrationalitie



Category: Counting On (TV) RPF
Genre: Alcohol, Flash Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27158387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonrationalitie/pseuds/poisonrationalitie
Summary: Jinger thought her freedom could be different.
Relationships: Jinger Duggar/Jeremy Vuolo
Kudos: 3





	the taste of freedom

In her dreams, freedom didn’t taste like this.

In her dreams, freedom tasted like real cake, and all-you-can-eat buffets but just for her, not shared amongst a dozen. It tasted like sleeping in until the room glowed golden with midday sun, and staying in her pyjamas for the whole day, and not touching the washing machine. It smelt like fruity perfume and boy sweat and the strange stink of city streets, like how it had smelt in the alleyway by the hotel the first time she’d been in New York. It felt like raindrops pelting her skin and sand between her toes and grass scratching her thighs and her shoulders crisping red with sun.

Freedom had never tasted so bubbly, so…old. Of course, Jinger had never even tried to imagine the taste, but still. She had thought it’d almost be like soda, given the fizz. It wasn’t. Freedom had never looked like floor-length dresses and covered wrists and a heavy gold necklace and crunchy hair and pads against her breasts and an ache in her stomach and bags beneath her eyes. It had never had the weight of a ring on the fourth finger of her left hand.

“To family,” Jeremy says, raising his flute. His friends, with ten years on her and dark clothes and pinched smiles, raise theirs.

“To family,” they echo. All eyes fall to her. Her family is home in Arkansas, or home in L.A, but not with her. Jessa and her children stay planted fifteen minutes around the corner from where Jessa sobbed into her shoulders when Jill got engaged first, and Jinger’s own children are with a nanny or a friend or some girl that tempts Jeremy in a house they don’t own with a crumpled handkerchief in the drawer by the left side of the big bed that she dabs her wet eyes on, trying to avoid smudging her mascara.

“To family,” Jinger says, and clinks her flute against theirs. Freedom never tasted like champagne for Jinger, but Jill’s tasted of pina coladas and so that was the baseline and the rule.

She would’ve preferred her toast with butter.


End file.
